Social media is 'awesome' and 'insane' | Opinion

As a producer on ABC’s “The Bachelor,” I have had lots of firsthand experience with hyperbole.

Not only is the long-running dating program “the most dramatic show ever,” it also features “the most romantic dates,” which are certainly “nothing like you’ve even seen before on television.”

You have to forgive Reality TV its overheated language; along with roses, hot tubs and buttery sunsets, it just comes with the territory.

What’s more troubling is the pandemic of self-hype that has infected the culture. We all tend to oversell just about everything that we can post on our social media accounts, no matter how mundane. I suppose Reality TV is partially to blame; I suspect it has more to do with our incessant need for overstating the case.

Think of your own social media feeds, and the many hundreds of comments people have made on your posts — at least the ones that aren’t about politics, which is another story altogether. You will most likely have trouble finding one sour note among them.

For all of the vitriol that’s flung around on the web by President Trump and so many others, social media sites like Facebook and Instagram are more like a group hug, a tight embrace from people who will not judge you. Everything — a Café Americano, a dog bath, a job promotion — is warmly welcomed with a short exclamatory comment and a thumbs-up emoji.

We want fulsome praise, but mostly we want validation, which is not how friendship really works. Providing an honest judgment or a sober appraisal of things kinks the steady dopamine drip of fake love.

This is all right, to a point — love indeed trumps hate, as we are constantly being reminded lately. As online usage time spikes to unprecedented levels — by the end of 2019, Americans will spend more time online than they do watching television — the juiced-up language we use on our feeds is seeping more and more into our verbal communication. Pithy hyperbole has become our common tongue.

In this increasingly strange and troubling time in our history we run from negativity, but reflexive flattery is meaningless.

We all want praise and it feels good to dispense it, too. By doing so we are using verbal short-cuts to replace fully-formed thoughts. That might sound churlish coming from someone who uses words for a living, but in fact our vocabulary is diminishing.

In 2015, a study conducted by London’s Institute of Psychiatry found that the more distracted we are, the dumber we get. Those of us who are frequently distracted (we check our phones every 12 minutes, our email even more frequently) are literally losing IQ points. We are constantly toggling between so many sources of information that our cognition is clouding over.

Hence, we tend to pull from an ever-smaller wellspring of words.

Certainly our tweeter-in-chief isn’t doing us any favors. We have come a long way from “ask not what you can do for your country” to “national emergy.” If a man can rise to the highest public office in the land by reducing complex issues to grammatically mangled outbursts of 140 characters or less, it sets an awfully low bar for the rest of us.

Recently I conducted a highly informal survey of the ways in which hyperbole has striated our language. My fieldwork encompassed a cross-section of people — teenagers, middle-aged white-collar professionals, millennials, clerks, musicians.

The two most common words used to describe virtually everything — Jasper John’s target paintings, Cardi B, Jeff Bezos, LeBron, the Bilbao, Tuesday’s lunch — were awesome and amazing, followed closely by insane. Even my septuagenarian father, a man who takes high-level math logic and constitutional law classes online in his spare time, has become too liberal with his awesomes. (‘In Forma Pauperis is really an awesome concept!’).

No one wants to be judgy and no one likes to be judged, but to love everything is to love nothing.

Marc Weingarten is a television producer and the author of "Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water and The Real Chinatown."